On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 06:39:08PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> If the facility is later implemented as a C executable (or whatever)
> instead of a shell lib, the shell lib would still have to be shipped in dpkg
> so that maintainer scripts don't fail ungracefully when trying to source it.
> That makes it hard to ever get rid of that interface once deployed.
Fair enough, this is a good argument against the shell lib
approach. It works pretty well with the conffile case, especially now
that Guillem announced it will work on it directly within dpkg.
Still, shell lib vs C implementation shows the unavoidable trade off
between being easier to deploy (shell lib) and becoming part of dpkg
itself (C implementation). *If* the goal is building a place where to
start factorizing tons of maintainer script snippets that we are
accumulating then shell lib looks, at least to me, more appropriate
and more readily available.
> > In principle, that package can be dpkg itself (as it was suggested by
> > Joey). Note how we regularly write down in release notes to first
> > upgrade dpkg and then go ahead with the rest of the upgrade. That
> > would trivially solve the usual pre-dependency potential issues.
>
> No, the way to get dpkg upgraded first is by declaring the
> Pre-Dependency on dpkg. Then, if there *is* a pre-dependency loop,
> it's detectable and should be resolved...
Don't blame me for the release notes :-), I'm culpable of not having
contributed a single line to them.
But I do agree with you, and that's actually even better. It will just
mean that if packages are fine with the current stable version of the
maintainer script helper package, fine, otherwise they will just add a
Pre-Dependency as usual. As long as the helper package maintainers are
sane-minded, we will never have pre-dep loops.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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